Yesterday's Tomorrows
by William Easley
Summary: On a hot Sunday afternoon in 2016, Dipper and Wendy investigate a cavern with Native American petroglyphs on the walls - including one of a triangle with an eye in it. Reality becomes a bit disturbed. Some Wendip may be encountered, too!
1. Chapter 1

_I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them._

* * *

 **Yesterday's Tomorrows**

 **(Sunday, August 7, 2016)**

* * *

 **Chapter 1: A Long View**

Like the cat in the old song, the heat came back, it wouldn't stay away, the heat came back the very next day. That Sunday was sweltering, and it felt as if someone had clapped down a lid over the Valley and turned the burner to "simmer."

In the early afternoon, Teek, Mabel, and Tripper took off for the lake. Lazing on the back porch of the Shack, the air still and breathless, a sweat-sheened Wendy said to Dipper, "Why don't we go see if we can chase down a little breeze?"

"That would be nice," he said.

Breeze-chasing, as it turned out, involved climbing. They went far into the Valley, the road winding as it climbed through hills and then through the low mountains. Well, low for the Cascade range, but tall enough to offer a change in climate for Gravity Falls Valley.

Wendy drove them high up into the mountains, miles from town and not all that far from the encircling bluffs, along nearly non-existent roads and lanes, until the Dodge Dart had climbed nearly as far above the valley floor as the cliff rims. "Snow stays up here until May, sometimes," she said as she parked where the rough track of road just ended on a narrow plateau. They got out of the car. Wendy stretched luxuriously. "Little cooler here, anyway!"

Dipper stood beside the car and took a deep breath. Yes, about ten degrees cooler, and with a nice, light breeze. They stood on the rounded shoulder of a mountain, with the peak rising another hundred feet into the air behind them. "Nice view," he said.

Wendy went to the edge of a precipice and nonchalantly sat there, legs dangling. "Yeah, if it wasn't so hard to get to, it'd be a great spot for a picnic. Come on and sit with me!"

"Um," he said, sounding dubious. Though he wasn't as troubled by heights as his Grunkle Stan or his sister Mabel, flying was one thing. Hiking in the high hills wasn't bad, either. But sitting on a rocky cliff with a six-hundred-foot sheer drop gave him pause. However, he reflected that his Lumberjack Girl would probably catch him if he slipped. He came up, sat, and then inched forward, resisting the urge to look straight down.

"This," she said, "is called Mount Jagged. The peak's hell to climb. You can see it's just bare basalt for the last hundred feet, and slick as ice, they say."

"Ever climbed it?" Dipper asked.

"You daring me?" she asked with a raised eyebrow.

"No! No, I'm not! But, you know, it sounds like—"

She laughed. "Like the kind of things dumb Gravity Falls teens might do? I suppose it is, but me and my friends were more about gettin' in trouble with the law and stuff than trying to set mountain-climbing records. Nope, never heard of anybody our age trying it. Couple of older loggers went up long time back. Nothing to see but rock, nothing to do but climb down again, so it's not a big deal. Why are you breathing so hard?"

"The, um, altitude, I guess," Dipper said, but in truth he had looked up at the spire to their right and then when he looked back out over the Valley, he had a moment of vertigo.

Wendy took his hand. _Bothers you, doesn't it?_

— _Well, being this close to the edge makes me a little bit nervous. But I'm here with you. That matters more._

 _Thanks, man._

He didn't exactly relax, but he slowed his gasping and took time to appreciate the view, the Valley all emerald with forest and sapphire with lake and diamond-spray with the gleaming, distant waterfall. They could also see, somewhat to their left, the round dome of what Dipper thought of as Spaceship Hill, and past that the hills and part of the little shelf of Lookout Point, and then, surprisingly tiny in the distance, the town and the cliffs beyond.

"It does look little from way up here," Wendy said.

"I was just thinking that—oh." Her hand still rested on his.

 _Yeah, read your mind, Dipper! So what do you think? After we're married and when we're ready to settle down and all. Would you really want to live in the Valley?_

— _I think I'd like that. But there'll be time to decide. And I guess it depends on whatever we wind up doing for a living. Like if I became an IT nerd, we'd probably have to live down in Silicon Valley, or close by, the way Dad does._

 _Mm, yeah, I suppose. Well, that's a good ways off, time to think about it all later. But what about, you know, college? We can't exactly live in a dorm._

— _Western has married housing, an apartment complex. I think 120 units. I looked at the floor plans on line. They're tiny, about 400 square feet, just a living room/dining room/kitchenette and a little bedroom with bath. I read the reviews, and the students say they're adequate and . . . cozy. And noisy. So I don't know about that. I kind of think I'd rather rent a place off campus. More room and privacy._

 _I guess we can look into that. How about Mabel?_

— _What do you mean?_

 _Dude, she's going to Olmsted for her art degree. Their campus is only three miles from Western. She's gonna need a place to stay, too._

— _I . . . kinda thought she'd probably stay in a dorm for her freshman year._

 _But if we rented a house with two bedrooms, she could take one of them._

Dipper thought about that idea. Aloud, he said, "You know, I never imagined going off to college without her around. I suppose we could still see her sometimes if she was in a dorm and we were renting a place, I mean we'd be in the same town, sort of. But—there's Tripper now, too. She couldn't keep a dog in a dorm. At least I don't think so. I guess we might be able to keep him if we found the right house to rent. And I know Mabel—she'll want to be with her dog. So—if she'd want to, yeah, I'd go for that."

"Two bedrooms with a good separation between them, though," Wendy said. "Like on opposite sides of the house."

"Why would—oh."

Wendy giggled. "Yeah, man, 'oh!' It's cause of all the noise we'd make . . . you know, when we get a snuggled in bed together and . . . watch old movies!"

"Oh, man," Dipper said, laughing. "Are we gonna be so, you know, um, flirty after we're married?"

"We better be," she said. "Otherwise I don't wanna marry you!"

"Don't even," he said. They kissed, and he said, "Another reason for two widely-separated bedrooms. She just might insist on bringing Waddles and Widdles along!"

Wendy laughed at that. "Don't think so. I kinda think they're gonna go live with my Aunt Sallie. They'll have lots of company on her farm, Soos won't have to fuss with taking care of them, and they'll be happy. Sallie's callin' Gompers her guard goat these days!"

It was still too hot to contemplate even a pleasant future, though. Although the refreshing breeze remained, sun still shone hot on their rock ledge, and 88 degrees didn't feel that much cooler than the 98 they'd driven out of down on the Valley floor.

They retreated to the shade of some stunted pines, spread a blanket, and lay back side by side peering up through the boughs at the blue sky. "I am going to miss you so extra bad after your birthday this year," Wendy said.

"It's getting harder to be separated," Dipper agreed. "I'll think of you every day."

She nudged him.

"And I'll think about you a lot more every night!" he added hastily.

Wendy rolled over on top of him. "You better," she said, kissing him. She just lay there for about a minute, nuzzling him, but then she sighed. "This would be so nice if it was about another ten degrees cooler!"

Her soft weight rolled off him again. He yawned. "Want to go to the lake?"

"Too much bother," she said. "My hair's gettin' long again. Takes a lot of time to dry now."

"Movie at the mall?"

"Don't think there's anything on I want to see," Wendy told him. "Guess the hot weather's made my laziness break out again."

"There must be some fun place that's cool," Dipper murmured. "Wonder if the Crawl Space is habitable again?"

"Dunno. Guess we could ask the Gnomes. They'd know. But I'll bet it still stinks like sulfur."

"Yeah, probably. We could go into the cave behind the Falls. That's always cool."

"Yeah, but last time the gelatin monsters that copied us made it kinda uncomfortable for me," she said. "Wonder how they're makin' out?"

"There was a gel Wendy and a gel Dipper," Dipper said. "By now they probably have a family of little dessert molds."

"Lime and blueberry flavored! But let's not go there, Dip. There's other caves," Wendy said. "Want to go explore one?"

"Is it cool?"

"Temperature-wise, yeah, pretty much. If you mean 'cool' as in awesome and exciting, not really. All the legends say the first people—you know, Native Americans—explored it and had a kind of, I dunno, temple or shrine or some biz back in there. One chamber is decorated with their art."

"You ever been?" Dipper asked.

"Me? No. Dad says when he was a kid, that was somewheres you went on a dare. But something bad happened, some kid got lost in it and died or something, and the entrance got boarded up. I think your Grunkle Stanford investigated it, but I dunno if that was before or after it got closed off."

"Huh." Dipper thought back to the Journals. "Grunkle Ford did write about seeing a version of the Cipher Zodiac in some cavern. A petroglyph. And about a Chinook wise man who battled Cipher, but lost the fight and failed to banish him. Could that be the cave?"

"Maybe," Wendy said. "All I really know is that it's a hard place to get to, and then you have to like crawl for a long way underground before the cavern opens out. But there are ancient pictures on the walls, Dad says, and kids used to find stone arrowheads and blades and junk in the sand on the floor. We could go see."

"Or," Dipper countered, "we could go to the Gnomes' territory and check out the Gack of Doom. Haven't been there in a few years."

"Ugh," Wendy said, shuddering. "No thanks. That's where I saw you killed by that snaky dragony monster—"

"The Sentivore," Dipper said. "And to be fair, it wasn't me. It was—"

"Yeah, I know, one of your copy-machine clones. Anyway, I'd rather not. Real or just faked, that was a horrible time for me. And we weren't even in love back then!"

"Speak for yourself," Dipper said, smiling. "I've been in love with you ever since you lent me the golf-cart key the first time."

She leaned against him. "Yeah, yeah. I guess back then I was already head over heels in _like_ with you, anyway. I just know that when it looked like that thing had killed you—I was about to lose it, man, go totally berserk crazy. So, no caving?"

"Spelunking," Dipper automatically corrected. "I don't know—maybe we might visit the cave your dad told you about, if it's not too far and not too dangerous. Don't want to get lost underground."

"Don't know if you could," Wendy said. "From Dad's description, it's a pretty straight shot in and out. But if you don't want to—"

"No," Dipper said, getting up, "let's do it. But we'll just look around, maybe take a couple of photos. No souvenir hunting for arrowheads or anything, and we won't put any graffiti on the walls."

"Deal," Wendy said. "You want to drive?"

Dipper thought of the winding road—whoever drove would have to back the Dodge Dart down about fifty feet to reach a spot wide enough to make a three-point turn, and there would be a steep drop on the driver's side until they reached the turn-around place. "I think you'd better do it," he said. "I'll put my hand on the back of your neck and pick up your skills at reverse driving."

"Is that all?"

"I swear," he said smiling.

"Darn," she replied. And then she sighed. "Well, a girl can dream."


	2. Chapter 2

**Yesterday's Tomorrows**

 **(Sunday, August 7, 2016)**

* * *

 **Chapter 2: A Tight Squeeze**

A sweating Dipper pushed some ferns aside and followed Wendy through tough undergrowth. "You sure you know where this place is?" he asked. They had been hiking for more than an hour, and even in the woods, in the shade, the air hung heavy and humid.

"Not exactly," she said, glancing back over her shoulder. "The cliffs are just ahead, though, kind of an outcrop. We may have to scout along them, but it should be pretty obvious. Ought to look like the entrance to an Old West mine, like in _Yours, Mine, and Monsters."_

That forced a chuckle from Dipper. Wendy had named an ancient, nearly incomprehensible cowboy-and-monsters movie, one from the nearly no-bud?get bunch that Gravity Falls TV rotated every Friday and Saturday night. "You mean fiberglass rocks and cardboard support beams? Is there by any chance a bunch of monsters that look like people with oatmeal spray-glued to their faces inside?"

"Who knows?" Wendy asked cheerfully. "Told you, I've never been in there myself. I just know where it is because Dad warned me never to go into it."

"Oh, well—that's a big recommendation," Dipper said. "Pfft." A fern frond had lashed back into his open mouth. He spat a few green oval leaves and wiped his lips.

"Ground's rising," Wendy said. "Should be real close now. Oops, the rocks underfoot are kinda loose. Watch me and put your feet where I step."

Dipper watched her, but his gaze didn't sink as low as her feet. Or even her knees. But what he did see made up for the drive and the long hot push through the woods.

The rise became steep, and when Wendy stopped, she stood a couple of feet higher than he did, and he blundered right into her, face-planting in her left hip. "Watch it, dude!" she said. "This is not the place." Then, much less sternly, she added, "Now, if the cave is nice 'n cool . . . ."

Dipper stepped up next to her. They stood on a slope of sand and pebbles fallen from the cliff or washed down by the weather over thousands of years. Ahead, not six feet away, reared a stony bluff. Unlike most of the rocks in Gravity Falls, the stone that made it up were all sedimentary—mostly blue sandstone, Dipper thought. The sedimentary layers showed up clearly, slanting horizontal streaks, alternating darker and lighter. "Huh," he said.

Wendy gave him a look. "What huh? Looks more likely this way. Follow me, Dip."

"I said 'huh,'" Dipper grunted, "because nearly all the rock in the Valley is basalt or volcanic of some kind. This must've been like a lake bed millions of years ago. Or maybe an arm of the ocean."

"Found it," Wendy crowed from about twenty feet ahead of him. He stumbled along the loose spill of rock and soil—the stuff known as scree—at the foot of the bluff until he reached her. A bad tangle of underbrush had completely covered the boarded-up entrance to the cave—she had used her small axe to chop away enough to allow them to stand close to the bluff.

"Doesn't look very big," Dipper said. The cavern entrance evidently was a breach in the stone that started as a slanting crack between two sedimentary layers and then broadened out—a bit, anyway—to wind up as a slanted triangular gap maybe two feet wide at its widest and only about four feet tall toward the narrow top-right end. It looked as if, possibly, an underground stream had worn its way through here, though no trace of it remained outside of the cave.

Rough-hewn planks—Dipper wondered if they were Manly Dan's handiwork—had been nailed up by huge iron stakes, maybe railroad spikes, driven in through what looked like drilled holes. Wendy tugged on the top board. "Good thick redwood, very durable. Still attached pretty firmly, and not rotten at all," she said. She wedged the blade end of her axe behind the board and levered.

The wood creaked, a patter of rock grains peppered the Vancouveria, the low-growing "inside-out flowers" that had sprung up on the scree. "Grab hold and pull, Dip," Wendy said. "Watch your fingers, though."

She had tugged the wood loose enough for him to grasp the top and strain back. He felt it give, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, until suddenly the spike turned loose and the whole thing creaked back and he lost his grip on it. It fell diagonally, still partly blocking the opening.

"No sweat," Wendy said, swiveling the whole board to the right, like an arm gate opening. She bent down and picked up the fallen spike and laid it carefully on the ground, in a clear spot. "We'll replace this later. Rest of the boards should be easy. Grab the next one, and when I say go, pull. One, two, three—go!"

That one came loose with three good hard yanks—loose on both sides. They set it and its spikes off to the left of the cave, then took care of four more boards. "You sure this is it?" Dipper asked.

It didn't look like much—a very narrow opening that ran up about three feet, then slanted right for about two more. Only the bottom was wide enough to creep through, if you were careful and went on hands and knees.

"Pretty sure," Wendy said, bending to peer into the darkness. "Matches Dad's description, and it's in the right place. Got your trusty flashlight?"

"Of course," Dipper said, taking it out. "Only I don't know how long the batteries will last. I recharged them not long ago and haven't used it much, but—well, let's not go too far or spend too much time in there, OK?"

"Aw, I was hoping to move in and play house with you," Wendy said, grinning. "Don't get your worrier fired up, Dip! We're just goin' in to take a look around and maybe shoot a few pictures, that's all."

"OK," Dipper said. "Let me go first, all right?"

"Sure," Wendy said. "But I don't think there's any bears inside. Far as anybody knows, the cave doesn't have any other outlet, and a bear couldn't have broke off the planks and then nailed them back up from inside. But I'll have my axe out, just in case. After you!"

Grunting, Dipper hunkered down and dropped to hands and knees. The first ten feet were terrible and claustrophobic, and twice he had to bend his elbows and worm through a low place, but then he came out in a tubular sort of tunnel—an arched ceiling about eight feet tall—it would have been taller, except for the stalactites hanging from it—and curved walls on either side. He guessed it might be eight feet wide at that point, and it ran back a good way.

Wendy came creeping out, stood, dusted her hands, and said, "Man! Your Grunkle Ford must've been real determined if this was a place he visited."

"Well, he's stubborn," Dipper conceded. He shone the flashlight on the walls. "No pictographs here. Not even any graffiti—no, wait. There's something."

They looked closely at what he had found, a little above eye level. It was only three inches long, and not carved into the stone, but put on with a black permanent marker—at least, it looked like that.

It was a simple arrow, straight line and then angled line, pointing into the darkness.

"That's Ford," Dipper said firmly.

"What, you recognize his arrow-writing?" asked Wendy.

"No, but he always has a pocket full of pens and markers," Dipper said. "He's the only guy I know who wears one of those pocket protector things."

"Well, let's check it out. Follow the black marker road!"

"Didn't know you were a _Wizard of Oz_ fan," murmured Dipper with a smile.

"Oh, yeah, big time when I was a little kid. Hey, you know after Dorothy and the Tin Man and the Scarecrow leave the cottage in the woods, if you look close, you can see a Munchkin hanging himself?"

"Not a Munchkin," Dipper said. "It's a bird opening its wings. An African crowned crane."

"You sure?"

"Positive," Dipper said. "Get the Blu-ray and look at the scene in step-motion. What happened was the company borrowed some weird-looking birds from the zoo to make the woods seem, you know, strange and different. Just when the Scarecrow and Dorothy come up to the cottage, on the left you can see that crane or another one pecking around on the far side of the Yellow Brick Road. And there's a toucan, too."

"Shatter my girlish illusions," Wendy said. "You'd think people would recognize cranes and toucans."

"Well, this was, what, the 1930s? No TV, and I guess people didn't get to zoos all that much. Did you know that in the original _Dracula,_ Count Dracula's castle is overrun with armadillos?"

"Get out of town!"

"Really. The director figured that nobody outside of the Southwest would know what they were and figure they were, I don't know, vampire rats or some deal? There's another arrow."

Discussing the marvels of old movies, they went back maybe sixty feet before Wendy pointed ahead. "I think this is it. If it goes anywhere."

"This" was a crevice that ran all the way up to the cave ceiling, a cleft in the rock that made them turn sideways to squeeze through. Dipper went first again, holding onto the flashlight, not that it did him much good in the passage. At times he thought they might have to drop down and creep through on hands and knees again, but they were just able to suck in their guts and press through the hard parts.

And then after fifty or sixty sideways paces, they came out again. This time the cavern was larger and more nearly circular, a space thirty feet across or thereabouts. Dipper's light gleamed on pale yellow sand—the whole chamber was floored with it—and he held out an arm to stop Wendy from coming straight in. "Wait. Look there. See them?"

Wendy peered over his shoulder. "Footprints?"

"Yeah, and about Grunkle Ford's size, too. Oh, and look here on the flat stone!"

A slab about two feet in diameter lay just inside the chamber, and instead of an inches-thick layer of sand, it wore only a dusting. And in the dust was the perfect outline of a handprint, as if someone had crawled through the crevice and had pushed himself up with one arm as he emerged—someone with six fingers on his left hand.

"That's him," Wendy said. "No doubt about it."

"And . . . pictographs!" Dipper said, shining his light on the wall. To the left, just inside the cavern, from ground level to a spot eight or nine feet up, someone long ago had incised figures in the relatively soft blue sandstone.

Dipper saw humans, or at least stick figures with lollipop heads crowned with curved spiked headdresses. They looked as though they had been caught in the act of dancing. Above them ranged bison, deer, and bears and still higher flew birds.

"Owl," Wendy said, pointing. "Hawk. Eagle, I guess? Geese."

"I think this was a record of hunters and their game," Dipper said, using his phone to snap some pictures. They went into the cavern, right at the edge of the sand—Dipper didn't want to disturb any of the marks left by Grunkle Ford, for some reason—but at one point he stooped and picked something up from the floor, shaking sand off it.

"What did you find?" Wendy asked.

Dipper held it up. It was a sheet of paper torn from a pocket notebook, dry but not brittle. "Ford's writing, all right," Dipper said.

The letters were in block printing instead of Stanford's normal, clear cursive. The paper read,

* * *

WRWDO QR RI JOBSKV WKUHH WKLUWB WKUHH. HBH RI SURYLGHQFH WBSH JOBSK UHPLQLVFHQW RI RQH LQ PRGRF IUDJPHQW ZLWK LQFDQWDWLRQ. CRGLDF FLUFOH DURXQG LW PHDQV ZKDW? PXVW VNHWFK

* * *

"And it doesn't mean anything," Wendy said. "Seriously, what is this? A code?"

"A cipher," Dipper said. "This is an easy one, the three-back Caesar cipher. Ford only used that when he first started to encrypt some of his Journal entries. I guess he tore out this sheet and re-did it. Maybe he recounted the glyphs or something and wanted to correct his notes—you can see he didn't finish the thought, and there's plenty of room."

"Can you read this?" Wendy asked.

"Here you go," Dipper said, taking her wrist in his left hand. He telepathically shot her the knowledge.

"Yeah, now I see!" Wendy said immediately. "It is pretty easy when you know the secret, I guess. Huh. Total of 333 glyphs. Who's Modoc?"

"That was the name of a Native American wizard," Dipper said. The air in the cavern suddenly seemed to be too thin. "Uh, he built a primitive Portal for Bill back in, I guess, pioneer days. But he hadn't finished it before he realized that Bill was a menace and destroyed it in time to keep Bill from coming through. And then because Modoc was afraid Bill might take over his mind and make him repair it, he, um, Modoc, uh, burned himself alive."

"Oh, man!" Wendy said. "That's messed-up!"

"Yeah, Grunkle Ford's never talked much about Modoc, but in some old library he found an evangelist's unpublished diary from the 1800s. This guy was trying to convert the Chinook people, and he either interviewed Modoc just before he committed suicide, or else someone who'd known Modoc's story. The missionary guy had, uh, written down the stuff about Modoc and also an incantation. A version of the incantation is also somewhere on the wall in here. And reciting that out loud was how Ford first—whoa, speak of the devil."

The light had hit the first of what would turn out to be three representations of Bill Cipher in the cave. It had been gouged into in the sandstone and then some red pigment had been worked into the cut, presumably meant to make it stand out.

This pictograph was simple, without the trimmings—no top hat, bow tie, or cane. Just an equilateral—well, roughly equilateral—triangle with a round eye and a distorted pupil. It was high up on the wall.

And it seemed to be staring down, enigmatically, at them.

Dipper felt goosebumps rising on his neck and arms.


	3. Chapter 3

**Yesterday's Tomorrows**

 **(Sunday, August 7, 2016)**

* * *

 **Chapter 3: Unmoving Pictures**

"Chill, dude," Wendy said, rubbing Dipper's back. "It's just a rock carving."

"I know," Dipper said, taking a deep breath. "But—well, Bill Cipher." This version of him was as simple as possible, just the outline of triangle, eye, and pupil—but it seemed to stare down coldly at them. "Seeing this makes it feel, you know. Like he's here. Almost."

Wendy patted him comfortingly. "But he's not here. He's gone. Or he's turned into Billy Sheaffer or something. You said."

"You're right. I'm edgy. It's not really him that spooked me. Just—memories, I guess," Dipper said. "Let's explore."

They found it a little bit like being in a prehistoric art gallery. The pictures on the wall were crude, from one point of view—not very representational, reminiscent of their subjects and not fully done portraits of them. Still—somehow—the scratches and paint gave things a weirdly effective sense of life. A buffalo that consisted of only six lines galloped in a way that showed how the ancient animal must really have fled from hunters. A hawk, wings raised, seemed to hover in the moment before diving on its prey.

"Mabel would know about this kind of stuff," Dipper said. "She's studied art history and all."

"We'll show her the photos when we get back," Wendy said, and that reminded him he was supposed to be taking pictures.

The cave walls bore tons of glyphs, some very prosaic—people and animals, hunting scenes, a group of people that seemed to be dancing, a snake caught in the process of wriggling into a hole, crescent moons, sunbursts, that kind of thing—and others less ordinary, in fact shading into the uncanny. One section showed humans—apparently, anyway—armed with bows and spears attacking what might have been a Manotaur, arms raised in rage, horned head thrown back, three arrows already lodged in his ribs.

Another looked like a rough sketch of Gnomes emerging—perhaps—from a tunnel, the stylized representation made it hard to be sure—six round little figures with pointed heads or hats, all in a row. Some red pigment had been smeared into the triangle hats, even. "The natives knew about the paranormal creatures here," Dipper said.

"Yeah, but that's to be expected, right? Anybody who lives in the Valley latches onto that sooner or later," Wendy pointed out. "Look up there. There's another Cipher."

Dipper centered the flashlight on this glyph, a few feet over their heads. "It's more complete than the first one," he said. "That's kind of a hat on him, and he's got a sort of butterfly mark that's probably his tie."

"This one's later than the first one just inside the cave," Wendy said. "Colors are fresher. He's sorta-kinda yellow. Here, move the light."

She gently pressed the flashlight down to illuminate some fainter scratches beneath the hovering Bill Cipher. "What are they doing?" Dipper asked.

Half a dozen—six seemed to be a magic number here—humanoid stick figures stood under Bill, apparently looking up at him, their arms thrown un in, what? Fear? Worship? "I've seen something like this one before," Dipper said. "It was . . . it was in the Northwest Mansion! That time Pacifica wanted me to exorcize a ghost. There was a kind of tapestry or banner that had an image a lot like this."

"What are they doing, though?" Wendy asked. "Fighting him or welcoming him as their lord and master?"

Dipper couldn't say. The figures were only rough indications, sticks for bodies, legs, and arms, circles crowned with spiked arcs—feather headdresses?—and no features. It was different from the tapestry. That one had silhouetted figures, two of them—uh-oh. Now he remembered. They were bowing to Cipher, engulfed in what looked like red flames.

That one had made their relationship to the interdimensional demon obvious.

"This is bad." Dipper lowered the beam still more. Beneath the feet of the humans stretched a layer of what clearly were meant to be stylized human skulls, little more than circles with triangular upper jaws imposed on them. Their empty eye sockets, nasal cavities, and teeth made what they were plain. And there were . . . ten of them.

"What?" Wendy asked, piercing his silence. "The natives, I guess, prayed to Bill for help in some battle, maybe? And they killed their enemies and won?"

"Yeah, it could be that. Or it could just be a vision," Dipper said, more to convince himself than Wendy. "You know, Bill could always appear in people's dreams while he was in the Mindscape. Maybe in their dreams he was promising them something like that—if they'd obey him, he'd make them a great tribe. The winners in a big war or something."

"Nasty," Wendy said. "You know he'd never deliver. He'd trick them and enslave them."

"Right, that's true, but—you don't think about things like that when you're dreaming. Here, hold the flashlight for a minute while I take some photos."

Wendy did, stepping back to widen the beam. Dipper's phone flashed three times and he said, "Got them all, I think. I'm sure this cave is where Ford came. He sketched many of these in his Journals, but he didn't bring a camera, and back then there were no cell phones."

Wendy handed the flashlight back to him. She gave him a playful nudge. "Hey, wonder what Tambry would've done back then," she said.

 _She's trying to calm me down by making a joke._ Dipper shrugged and played along, though he had a hard time putting a light tone in his voice. "Maybe hang out in the local malt shop and play records on the juke box and gossip with her bffs."

They moved on, still keeping to the periphery, near the walls. Though blurred by time and settling, the larger footprints—surely Stanford's—showed what when he had come, he had ranged all the way around the cavern, back and forth, studying all the walls. For a space the glyphs became representations of mystery figures, more Manotaurs, a few Gnomes, something that might have been a Gremloblin, a human with a wolf-like head, a possible unicorn. Wendy had been right—whoever left the cave paintings clearly had explored the weird side of Gravity Falls.

"No aliens," Dipper murmured. "But that's to be expected. Grunkle Ford thinks that the spaceship crashed between twenty-five and thirty million years ago. The aliens all died in the crash or soon after. Some of their creatures escaped and survived, though."

"Like what?" Wendy asked.

"The Sentivore. The Shapeshifter."

"Ugh, sorry I asked," Wendy said. "Is that another Bill way back there?"

The most complete representation of Bill had been chiseled and painted on the far wall of the cave, directly opposite the narrow opening. "Yeah, this is it," Dipper said. "This is where Ford found the Cipher zodiac. And where he recited out loud the spell that called Bill into his mind."

"Didn't you say Gideon did the same thing?"

"That time when he wanted to get the combination to Grunkle Stan's safe, yeah," Dipper said. "Mabel and Soos caught him but they passed out at the same time Gideon did. That's how they were able to hear what Bill said to him, Gideon and both of them were all unconscious."

"Man, I remember. That was the time when Gideon took over the Shack. Yep, that's Bill up there on the wall, all right. No mistaking this one."

It was the largest and most finished glyph of Bill Cipher in the cave. Here he was complete: Cipher in top hat, with skinny arms and legs, hovering inside a circle. An outer circle divided into segments framed the symbols of the zodiac: A question mark, a sort-of fish about to close its open mouth on a morsel, a six-fingered hand, a broken heart, a pentagram, a shooting star, a llama, something that might have been a pair of glasses drawn by someone who'd never seen spectacles, a pine tree, and—

"There you are," Dipper said, concentrating the beam on a rectangle.

"Dude, how would an ancient tribe even know what a plastic bag of ice looked like?" she asked. "Gotta be a hoax."

"No, I don't think so. It's not _quite_ a bag of ice," Dipper said. "See the label, I guess?" A vertical line, a V rotated ninety degrees to the right, three dots in a row. "We're reading it as I-C-E, but I think it's the artist trying to picture something he saw only in a vision or a dream. It's not exactly the way we'd see it. Neither are the eyeglasses."

"Yeah, I see," Wendy said. "Llama looks a little off, too, like something the artist barely remembered seeing. Well, at least there aren't any worshipers around this one. Not quite as creepy."

Faded, smudged marks in a couple of rows above the circle looked as if they had been applied with some pigment and then later mostly erased. "I'll bet that was the incantation," Dipper said. "Grunkle Ford had already read a version of it in the missionary's diary, and these must have been, I don't know, pictograms that represented the sounds in Modoc's language. Anyway, Grunkle Ford remembered the chant and said it."

"And Cipher showed up." Wendy grunted. "Bad move on Dr. P.'s part, huh?"

Dipper shrugged. "Well, yeah, Cipher did appear to him, but not right away, not here in the cave. I think it was some hours later. Grunkle Ford had left the cave, and in the woods somewhere nearby, he suddenly felt so tired he sat under a tree and fell asleep. Then Bill came to him in a dream. Told him he was a Muse and promised that he'd inspire Ford to create great things." Dipper's voice became resentful. "Instead he showed Ford how to construct a Portal, just so Bill could invade our reality. It was all a dirty trick."

"I'm surprised Dr. P. could be tricked. Your great-uncle's, like, the smartest guy I know," Wendy said. "Sorry, Dip!"

He chuckled ruefully. "I'm not bothered. I know you're right. He's had a big head start on me!"

"Yeah, so why did he fall for Bill's lies?"

For a few moments Dipper didn't answer as he studied the glyph on the wall. "I think . . . we've all got weak spots in our armor. Grunkle Ford's was his curiosity. And maybe his ambition—he kinda felt like he'd failed his and Stan's parents way back in high school, and, you know, he wanted to make up for it, to be a big success—and that left him open to Bill's flattery and all."

Wendy had become the official photographer. She'd made several flash snaps of the smudged letters—if that was what they were—and the zodiac. She paused. "Yeah, I suppose that if he offered me a chance to—never mind."

"To see your Mom alive again," Dipper said softly. "It would be hard to resist."

Wendy gulped and in a soft, choked voice, she asked, "How'd you know?"

"Because I know you," Dipper said simply. "And that's Bill who's doing the tricking, too. He had all the time in the world and a butt-load of patience. For decades, he spied on everybody's daily life, and he snooped in their dreams. That's how he knew about how to get to Grunkle Ford. And he'd know how bad you missed your mom, too. But—Bill's gone."

"I sure hope he is," Wendy said. "That version of him, anyway. The crazy one."

"The trick is going to be keeping Billy Sheaffer from going the same way," Dipper said. "I have to have a man-to-man talk with him soon. I'm not looking forward to it, and I hope I don't screw it up. Huh. That's weird."

"What's weird?" Wendy asked.

Dipper held the light almost against the rock face, aiming it up to throw everything into sharp relief. "The tie. Look at it."

"Raised up," Wendy said.

"Yeah, like everything else was chipped away, just leaving the bow tie sticking up an inch above the surface. Unless—" Dipper reached up.

"Don't touch it, man!" Wendy said. "It gives me a bad vibe."

"I just want to see whether the bow tie is glued on or something," Dipper told her.

He pushed lightly at the tie.

It slipped smoothly into the stone, stopped, clicked, and glided back out, like a pushbutton.

An eerie light shone from behind them.

"Uh-oh," Wendy and Dipper said together.


	4. Chapter 4

**Yesterday's Tomorrows**

 **(Sunday, August 7, 2016)**

* * *

 **Chapter 4: Gravity Falls' Weirdest Home Movies**

"What the heck is that?" Dipper asked. He and Wendy stared at an illuminated image—not carved or painted on rock, but shimmering transparently in the air, like a movie projected on fog. It had no sound, but it was a moving picture, and it showed, evidently, a battle between Bill and Native Americans.

They didn't look at all lifelike—very flat, like primitive drawings animated to a semblance of life—and Dipper had the sense that what he was seeing might not have been real, just a possibility that never materialized.

But it did look fierce. Bill floated around some distance above the warriors, who angrily hurled spears and shot arrows at the drifting, top-hatted pyramid. When an arrow or spear came close, he casually waved it off and it veered or caught fire and poofed to ashes.

It looked as if he were daring them to try and hurt him—though they seemed to have no chance of doing that. He just demonstrated his invulnerability. But then he began to fight back, pointing his finger and firing rays of red energy at the foes. He started to pick them off, one by one, never missing as the humans fell dead.

"Man, this reminds me so much of Weirdmageddon," Wendy, said, crossing her arms and rubbing her biceps. "How do we turn it off?"

"I'm afraid to press the carving again," Dipper admitted. "Wait, what's this?"

The scene had changed abruptly. Now in an even sketchier style, Bill floated above a circled group, who were not attacking him, but holding hands and—possibly—chanting. These were even less detailed than the first, fighting group had been, little more than stick figures, really like a cave etching crudely animated.

"That must be the Zodiac!" Wendy said. "Like, the ancient Chinook people were trying to defeat him, the same way that Dr. P. was gonna try in the Fearamid!"

With his eye frowning down at his enemies—or it looked like that, anyway—Bill sharply pointed as if ready to wipe them all out, but in that instant, all the figures below him raised their hands toward him—and he started to come apart. The blocks that comprised his body began to crumble from the base of the pyramid, and he waved his arms desperately, trying to stay airborne. Then, looking very two-dimensional, he crumbled and shrank, either through an unseen rift or just into thin air. The movement froze, and yellow letters shimmered into existence:

* * *

ODDS AGAINST SUCCESS TOO HIGH.

 _UGXSR KM WIKFYNPM WSBYG BME TGGI VHIMM GEIO FGQPUUDS._

* * *

"Oh, great. Bill really liked ciphers," Dipper said. "I think that's where he took his alias."

"Alias? You mean that's not his real name?" Wendy asked.

The glowing words just hung there in the air. No further movement and no scene change. Dipper shook his head. "As Grunkle Ford would say, 'Not likely.' See, Bill came from an unimaginably ancient time and a completely alien race. From a whole different reality, in fact. I think that after he started to hang out in the Mindscape of Earth, he just went by Bill Cipher for—uh, I don't really know, just reasons of his own." With his phone, he snapped a photo of the glowing display, not using a flash, and then confirmed on the screen that he could read the letters.

"What's this one say?" Wendy asked.

"Don't know. It's not a three-back. Probably a Vigenère, and the easiest solution to them is to know the keyword, which we don't. It's a short message, so it'll be hard to decipher."

"So—'odds against.' What does that mean?"

"This is just a guess," Dipper said. "Bill was trying to take over Earth by persuading the Chinook wizard Modoc to build a portal. This might be—a computer simulation to judge whether he had a good chance of success or not? Maybe he foresaw that with the Zodiac completed and people on it opposing him, he wouldn't be able to succeed. But I don't really know."

Wendy asked, "Dude, if we'd walked into that picture, would we be, like, teleported to wherever it was taking place?"

Shaking his head, Dipper bent his knees and grabbed a handful of sand, which he tossed. It flew through the image of the letters without disturbing it and landed in a puff of the far side. "I . . . don't _think_ so," he said. "I think it's just a picture, but I don't understand why Bill would have created it—unless—it might be his home movies!"

"Oh, great," Wendy said. "Like Mabel and her scrapbook!"

"Whoa!" Dipper said.

Because the moment Wendy spoke, the picture changed. Now it showed a twelve-year-old Mabel, wearing the shooting-star sweater that back then was her favorite, lying on her stomach on the Shack floor and pasting photos of a fishing trip into her scrapbook. The movement lasted only ten seconds, and then it faded to a dimmed still image, and more letters appeared:

* * *

GIPO SQ E PCK TGCBGB. C BSJD IM "QRSMDMLQ WRKV".

* * *

"That's not an animation," Wendy said. "That's really a picture of Mabes. I remember her just like that, braces and all. That was like a real-life movie, not a computer thing."

"That little scene happened right after we tried to catch the Gobblewonker," Dipper said. "I remember the photos she was pasting in her book." He took a picture of this label, too, showing against the faint image of Mabel intent on pasting in the last photo.

"I wonder if we can make it show anything we want," Wendy said. "Hey! I wanna see me and Dip catch the car thieves!"

Nothing happened.

"Um—show us diving into Moon Trap Pond," Dipper said.

Still nothing.

Wendy tried again: "Show us bustin' out of Mabel Land."

It did, in a spasmodic, brief twitch of movement that lasted no more than three seconds, like a repeating-loop animated .GIF. The bubble hovered between the cliffs, it popped, and Mabel, Dipper, Wendy, and Soos sailed out on the back of a giant leaping Waddles.

* * *

RSU NMB DLCI IQMENO? AFY LYN E USPJ YJ RSXYXMSW? WMWIZYHW GMJV TYI!

* * *

Dipper photographed this and said, "Uh, translate that into clear English."

The letters re-formed:

* * *

HOW DID THEY ESCAPE? WHO HAD A WILL OF TITANIUM? SOMEBODY WILL PAY!

* * *

"Man, I think I got it. This is Bill's diary!" Wendy said. "He made notes of things that happened, or of plans he was making—like Dr. P. does in the Journals!"

"'Will of titanium?' You know, this shows that Bill didn't expect Mabel to ever leave the prison bubble," Dipper said. "He was surprised, so he somehow captured the moment to study it later. Not with a camera. The eyebats, maybe. Huh. Uh—show us how Grunkle Stan got his memory back!"

Nothing.

He tried again: "Show me how Bill Cipher saved my life when the Horroracle tried to kill me."

Again, nothing.

"How come it doesn't always work?" Wendy asked.

"I don't know. Unless—wait, those things happened after Grunkle Stan punched him out—"

At those words, the image briefly flared red, then went dark.

"No message this time," Wendy said. "Maybe that red flash was—Bill Cipher dying?"

"Maybe. I think," Dipper said slowly, "this kinda replays Bill's memories, the ones that he selects to record? So it can only show us what he knew or thought or, like you say, was planning. After he got punched out—the memories stop. I mean, he couldn't even show that business with the Horroracle, and he was in the Mindscape for that, so this device or whatever must have been something he could operate only before Weirdmageddon. Does that make sense?"

"Much as anything," Wendy said. "Turn it back on. Or switch on your flashlight. It's too dark in here."

"Show that time at the carnival," Dipper said. "When Wendy wanted the panda duck."

"Oh, dude, no, that's painful!" Wendy protested.

But the floating image lighted up, and they saw Dipper toss the baseball up and catch it confidently, then make a wild throw. A second later, the ball whizzed back into view, knocked over the milk bottles, and the carny handed Wendy the colorful creature of indeterminate species.

And this time the caption read in ordinary English:

* * *

PINE TREE SCORES ONE FOR RED! AR, THOUGH.

* * *

"Um—Dip, that never happened," Wendy said. "I remember distinctly, the ball bounced back and clocked me a good one in my right eye. It was black for days."

Dipper gulped. "Um—it did happen," he said. "But you don't remember it, because it happened in an alternate time line—wait, alternate reality! That's what the AR stands for!"

"You better tell me about this," Wendy said, studying the faded image of her grinning from ear to ear as she cuddled her prize against her chest. "As I recall it, you gave me my panda duck a long time later, that summer when you and Mabel and your uncles were comin' back from Canada and happened on the same carnival. Is that wrong?"

"No, it's right," Dipper said. "See, that's _this_ time line. This is the one when I got a second chance to win it for you, and I'd had a lot of practice, so it just took me, um, a time or two to win it. What we just saw, well, it had to do with the first time we ran into Blendin Blandin and the Time Paradox Enforcement Squadron. See, me and Mabel stole his time tape—because the first time I tried to win you the prize, I did hit you with a ricochet, and then Robbie showed up, and I felt awful—"

He told the whole story, and somewhat to his irritation, the scenes played out as he described them. He ended after he'd told how he'd gone back one last time so that Mabel, not Pacifica, would win Waddles and not turn into Miserable Mabel pounding her head against the totem pole. The image faded to one of Mabel hugging a relatively tiny Waddles.

This time the caption that popped up read:

* * *

Too bad, Pine Tree, you didn't get Red,

So Shooting Star got her pig instead—

It's a tough lesson, but now you see

That some things that happen are meant to be.

* * *

"Aw, man!" Wendy said. "You really went back over and over and over to try to win me that prize?"

"I had a crush on you," Dipper reminded her. "And first, I didn't want to hurt you, and second, I wanted you to like me."

"Yeah, yeah, I already liked you. But it was sweet of you."

Dipper had to admit something. "Wendy, every single time I went back to try again, I gave you a black eye until I finally figured the winning angle, the one that needed Mabel's help. So in my memory I didn't just hit you with a wild throw one time—more like fifty!"

"Well, I don't remember 'em, so they don't count," Wendy said. "Hey, man, I forgive you. You were _trying_ to be nice."

"Thanks, Magic Girl."

Wendy squeezed his hand. "I wonder if, like, this thing stores Cipher's memories and junk. Maybe it's a kind of back-up system, like on a computer."

"Maybe," Dipper said. "or maybe he used it mostly to plan his attacks?"

Wendy said, "Hey, show us a plan of Bill's that he didn't use."

A few seconds later, Dipper regretted that request.

It showed Dipper—no, Bipper, as Mabel had called him, Cipher possessing Dipper's body—seizing Journal 3 and successfully escaping with it from the puppet show.

"Like an animated sketch again," Wendy said. "You can tell this one didn't really happen."

True, but the sketch was so detailed and clear that it made Dipper feel nauseated as he watched. Bipper arrived in the park and paused to scribble a note—not in code, but in plain English, and printed rather than in longhand: " _I can't take it anymore. Demons are invading my mind. I'm sorry, Mabel, but I have to end it the only way I know how."_

And then, to their horror, Bipper, still in the Reverend costume, climbed up to the top of the water tower and without even hesitating, leaped off—and they saw triangle Bill emerge from Dipper's plummeting body an instant before it hit with a sickening but silent crash. Then Bill, hovering over the body, looked as if he were laughing. The scene froze on that.

* * *

THEY'LL THINK HE WAS CRAZY, JUST LIKE ME!

NOW HE'S A GHOST FOR ETERNITY.

POSSESSING IS FUN, IN A BODY WITH BREATH—

NEXT, SHOOTING STAR CAN JOIN BROBRO IN DEATH.

* * *

Dipper angrily hurled another handful of sand through the image. "He was planning to kill me and Mabel both!" he said.

Wendy hugged him. "He didn't, though. These were just his plans. Like, he created the scenario but never got to play it out 'cause Mabel beat him. Of course, back then I thought _she'd_ gone crazy, shooting off all those fireworks right over our heads! If I'd known what she was really doing, I wouldn't have walked out on her show."

— _Want to watch any more?_

 _Not if you don't, Dip. This is some creepy junk, man._

"I've had enough," Dipper said. "Let me see if I can turn this projector, whatever it is, off." He switched on the flashlight and gingerly pressed the bow tie again. The floating images did flick to darkness. "Good," he said. "Let's go now. I'll look at the pictures later and see if I can figure out the codes."

They retraced their steps to the narrow passage and squeezed their way through, then reached the first tunnel—where they stopped short, because in the dim illumination from the flashlight, a figure sat on a boulder, bent over and huddled.

Dipper shone the light on it.

A wrinkled face, beneath a mess of thin, unruly, white hair, squinted eyes peering through heavy, thick spectacles into the light—Dipper's first thought was _A witch_!

It was an old, old woman, her stooped shoulders beneath a colorful shawl, a walking stick clutched in her hands. She shook as she leaned on the cane and with an enormous effort got to her feet. "Is that really you?" she asked in a cracked, breathless voice. "Wendy? Broseph? I kept telling them you'd come back. All these years, I kept telling them. I've come here looking for you nearly every day."

"Who—are you?" Dipper asked.

"Oh, Brobro," the old woman croaked. "I'm your sister. I'm Mabel. You two vanished in this cave more than sixty years ago. But I knew you'd come back. I think you busted something, though. Broseph—" she broke off into a hacking cough—"We gotta fix it. We gotta fix _you_."


	5. Chapter 5

**Yesterday's Tomorrows**

 **(Sunday, August 7, 2016)**

* * *

 **Chapter 5: Mr. Cipher Lends a Hand**

"Mabel?" Dipper asked, coming closer, blinking in disbelief. She was inches shorter than he, with gray hair going white, and she bore little resemblance to his twin, though she was wearing a colorful sweater and—yes, even a matching hairband.

"Don't look at me," Mabel murmured, turning away awkwardly and ducking her head. "I'm so old!"

"You're Mabel," he said, and he hugged her. He felt her trembling and realized that she was frightened—overjoyed, yes, but frightened, too. "What—how—did we just vanish?"

"All those years ago," Mabel whispered. "We looked and looked, and somebody found Wendy's old car, you know, it was green, I think, and I used to have a dog—what was his name?"

"Tripper?" Wendy asked softly.

The sweet, sad smile that came to her face made her look more like Mabel. "Oh, yes, I named him after the character in Dipper's books. Yes, Tripper. How could I ever forget that sweet little boy? He tracked you down to the cave opening. Grunkle Ford knew something about it, and as soon as he could he came to investigate, but we couldn't find any trace of you inside. But I knew you'd come back some day. I always knew. I've lived in Gravity Falls all this time, just waiting. I'm so glad to see you! Was it Blendin and time travel, or—"

"We don't know what's happened," Dipper said. "We're as much in the dark as you are. What—what year is it?"

Mabel shook her head and stepped back from him. "I'm so sorry, Dipper, but I'm not supposed to answer any questions at all. I—well, I'm gonna need some help. I need to call someone. Excuse me."

Dipper realized there was more light in the outer cave than there had been, and then he saw why: the torturous crawl-only entrance had been tunneled out into an arched opening about as wide and tall as a normal door, through which some daylight seeped.

Mabel mimed a phone—thumb to her ear, pinkie to her mouth—and said, "Dr. Sheaffer, please . . . hello, Billy! It's happened. I told you it would. Yes, really. Yes, Dipper and Mabel! I mean they're back! Yes! Wendy and Dipper both are back, and they haven't aged. Yes, that's where I am now, the outer cave. Come as fast as you can." She finished and shook her hand as if flicking water off her fingertips. "Bill will be here in a few minutes."

Wendy took Dipper's hand. Dude, I think she's hallucinating.

—I can't imagine Mabel this old. Maybe she's—you know.

From behind her specs, Mabel gave them a sharp look. "You've still got that mental voodoo going, haven't you? I know, you're both thinking I'm senile. I'm not. Everybody has these phone implants nowadays!" For a few seconds she just smiled at both of them, but then she teared up. "So young. You're both so young. Please just stand there quietly and let me look at you. I remember you both so well!"

Dipper swallowed hard. "Mabel—what about Mom and Dad? Our Grunkles?"

She shook her head. "I can't answer questions, Dipper. Billy warned me that if I ever found you, and I have, I can't talk about anything like that, or I'll meck up the time line and you'll never get back."

"What? Meck?" Wendy asked, blinking.

Mabel did a slap-the-air gesture. "I forgot you wouldn't know that! Old-timey slang, now, though, what the kids said, oh, thirty years ago. Means, uh, let me see, fu—no, that was a dirty one—mess! That's it. Mess up the time lines and you won't ever find the right one."

"So—we can't ask you any questions at all?" Dipper asked.

"Nuh-uh, Broseph. Or you can, but I can't answer any. You have to trust Billy, now. I can tell you he's called the Peacemaker nowadays. Staved off a world-wide nuclear war, possibly saved the whole human race that time. Then later he talked everybody into serious disarmament. And the atmosphere's improving, climate's coming back, all thanks to him and his staff of experts. So trust him, you hear me, you young rapscallions?" Again she flashed the familiar old Mabel grin.

"Yes, Sis," Dipper said. But to Wendy, he sent a silent message:—I hope she's right. Sounds like Billy Sheaffer really meant it when he said he was going to try to be good!

Hope so, Dip. Man, I'm so sorry I suggested visiting this place! I screwed up bad.

—Wasn't your fault, Wen. You had no idea something like this would—

"Well, well, well!"

Dipper jerked around. A tall, lean man had stepped through the arched opening. He stood straight-backed at least six feet tall, still had a shock of pale hair—pure white now—and his face was care-lined. Bright blue eyes, two of them, and he carried a cane and wore an outlandish outfit, yellow with jet-black trim, a white shirt with a collar but no visible buttons but a very crisp black bow tie. "Dipper! Wendy! It's good to see you." He walked like a much younger man than he appeared to be.

"Billy?" Dipper asked.

"Dr. Bill Sheaffer," Mabel corrected. Billy crossed to her, took her hand, and kissed her cheek. "I told you they'd be back one day," she said to him with a trace of smugness. "Didn't I tell you?"

He squeezed her hand. "You did, over and over again. And I always believed you, didn't I?'

Dipper said, "Man, I have so many questions—"

Billy held up his hand. "Can't answer them," he said. "Because—"

"Yeah, it would meck up the time lines, Mabel told us," Wendy told him. "But tell us at least—what did we do to get here, in this time? We didn't mean to!"

Billy stood beside Mabel, smiling at them. "Well, Red—ah ha ha, look at your face! I thought that'd get a rise out of you. Wendy. Just kidding, I won't do it any longer. I should be adult enough now, I'm seventy-five, so from now on, it's Wendy, all right?"

"All right," she said. She grinned. "You know, for an old dude, you're still kinda handsome."

He bowed—actually did a sweeping, theatrical bow—and said, "I try, my lady. Oh, Pine Tree—you don't mind, do you?—Pine Tree, look at what I can do." He covered his left eye with a palm. "Hold up some fingers, Wendy."

She did.

Billy yelped out one short laugh. "One! And that's still a rude gesture! No hard feelings, though, because I like your moxie, kid. Now—" he covered his other eye. "Again, Dipper, you hold up some fingers. Three fingers! Look at me, I got two eyes now—one's an electronic implant, but it works just like the real one. Man, being able to have 3-D vision and depth perception again is great. All right, let's get you two kids sorted out. Mabel, you'll have to stay here, dear. Are you comfortable?"

"I'm all right," Mabel said. "I got my rock to sit on, and there's knitting in my purse. But before you go—let me hug Dipper and Wendy one last time."

She did and she whispered in his ear, "You go straighten yourselves out now! Don't make your Mabel have to go through what I've gone through, all right? I love you, Dipper."

"I love you, too, Sis," Dipper said, choking up.

Mabel hugged Wendy then, and whispered something to her that Dipper couldn't hear. Wendy glanced at him and said quietly, "I promise, Mabes. It's good to see you."

Then with Billy leading the way, they threaded the needle again, creeping through the narrow passage to the symbol room. Billy held up his cane, and light flared from it, more brilliant by far than Dipper's flashlight.

"Man!" Billy said, turning around in a circle and admiring the cave glyphs. "This brings back so many memories. Old Modoc and his people. This was his contemplation cave. I didn't treat him so good, I'm afraid. I didn't treat anybody very well back in the day. For what it's worth, kids, over the decades I've learned to be a little better. I'm really sorry for what I did to you two back when—well, you remember. Dipper, you were what, twelve? And Wendy fifteen. I was really crazy back then." He laughed, but it was a healthy-sounding laugh. "Still am, but in a better way, I hope. OK, let's do this. Now, one of you pushed the bow tie, am I right?"

"I did," Dipper admitted.

"Mm-hm, thought so, so you read part of my Journals. Or saw the—the word used to be 'movies,' right? Yeah, saw some of the movies. But you also somehow activated the prognosticator. That's a way I had of examining probabilities, chances of my schemes working out. They draw on alternate time-lines, and you both got shunted off the proper rails, with the result that the world outside the cave went on without you for sixty-five years. Mabel's turning eighty-one in a few days. I'll be seventy-five."

"Wait, wait," Dipper says. "If we go back—if we get back on the right track—then—what about your lives during those sixty-five years?"

"I think it'll all get erased," Billy said. "Don't worry, though, Mabel and I won't just blink out of existence. We'll—rewind. We'll go back to the ages we were, and we won't remember any of this. But that's for the best, kid, believe me. Mabel hasn't been happy for almost all of her life, and she deserves to be happy."

"Then you won't, like, be the big peacemaker?" Wendy asked.

"Maybe I will be," Bill said with a shrug. "I hope I will be. I'll ask you two to remember this, because I won't: Let Mabel be my best friend, Dipper. My—well, my Muse, if you want to call it that. Nothing romantic. She ought to have a guy she's in love with to marry, and I hope this time she'll do that and not give up her chance because she's broken-hearted about your disappearing. Well, that won't be a problem, so just be a good brother, OK? And a good sorta-kinda older sister? But whatever else happens, I need Mabel to be my Platonic friend and closest advisor. I have to have her advice and her humor and her chaos to make me—well, whatever I've become over the last half-century and more. Kid, I value your friendship, too, but Mabel—she's one of a kind. OK?"

"I guess," Dipper said. "I won't try to keep her from being your friend. But if you ever hurt her—"

Billy raised his right hand. "I swear I won't. And if I do, come at me with all you got."

"You really wouldn't want that," Wendy said. "'Cause I'd come with him!"

"Ha!" Billy laughed. "Good one, Wendy. Now, here's what you have to do, and you have to do it for yourselves—I can't stay here with you without risking reality folding up like a tesseract and imploding the universe. It's not going to be easy, and you're going to hate doing it at times, but you have to."

"We'll do it, if it'll get us back," Dipper said. "Just tell us."

Billy nodded. "OK. What you're going to do is turn the bowtie, twist it to the right in a half turn, and then push it until it clicks. And repeat those two steps again and again and again, until you see yourselves standing in this cave. Don't push the bowtie to end any segment except that last one—other times, twist it and then press, OK? May take three tries, may take a hundred, but don't give up. Once it's like you're seeing a live movie of yourselves at that moment, then press the bowtie to end it. The picture will go out. You two leave the cave quickly and don't come back. You'll be on the right time track then, and you'll return to your own year somewhere from an hour to a few days after you first entered the cave."

"Why won't we like it?" Wendy asked.

"I'm sorry," Billy said, "but you'll get flashes of other alternate time lines, just possibilities as far as you're concerned. Some of them might make you furious, or break your hearts. But you kids are brave. Keep doing it, all right? Trust me. You'll get there in the end."

"And if we don't make it?" Dipper asked. "If you and my sister don't get your—rewind?"

Billy put a hand on his shoulder. "I'll take care of Mabel for the rest of her life," he said. "I promise you, Pine Tree. I'll tell you this much: We have life-extending technology now. Mabel's been so unhappy with the way her life has gone, she's refused it. She could look and feel thirty years younger than she is, but—just more years of sadness, she says. She's uh, getting ready to go. But if worst comes to worst, I'll never desert her and I'll make her as comfortable and happy as I possibly can."

"You really have changed," Dipper said.

Billy sighed. "Yeah, thanks, kid. I hope the Axolotl agrees. Well—I better leave now. Wish you the best, you two. Dipper, do you mind if I give your girl a kiss on the cheek for luck?"

Dipper glanced at Wendy. "I suppose that will be OK," she said.

He stepped up to her and smiled into her eyes. "Your whole life is ahead of you," he said softly. "And you look so young."

And without warning, he kissed her, just a quick one, on the lips. "Ah-ha-ha! Just for luck, Red!"

She slapped him, not softly, and he threw back his head and his laughter boomed. "She's a keeper, Dipper! Too good for you, but you're what she wants. You take the best possible care of each other. Believe it or not, and you probably won't, but I love you both! So long, and as they used to say in the olden molden days, fare thee well!"

He turned and strode back to the narrow passage, taking his cane and the light with him, and Dipper turned on his flashlight again. "Sorry about that," he said to Wendy.

"Meh, wasn't your fault, dude," Wendy said with an enigmatic smile. "And you know, for such an old guy—he's kinda hot!"


	6. Chapter 6

**Yesterday's Tomorrows**

 **(Sunday, August 7, 2016)**

* * *

 **Chapter 6: Round and Round We Go**

" _Spirit," asked Scrooge, "are these the shadows of things that WILL be, or are they the shadows of things that MAY be only?"_

Everyone knows the _Christmas Carol_ story. Old Scrooge, a miser, a grasping, wrenching, squeezing, covetous old sinner, receives the blessing (or curse?) of being visited by four Spirits, all of whom show him visions. Marley's Ghost shows him chains and weights destined to trap his soul after death, and he threatens Scrooge with eternal punishment if he doesn't mend his ways. Then three Spirits of Christmas, past, present, and future, take Scrooge on a tour of his life from his schoolboy days to his old age and—worse. In fact, the familiar tale may be the very first time-travel story.

From each period of time, the Spirits show Scrooge images of what was, is, and will be. Shadows, they call them, merely moving mental pictures, memories—the Ghost of Christmas Past gently keeps the elderly Scrooge from wasting his breath by calling out joyfully to his old school chums, who are still merely youngsters: "These are only the shadows of things that have been. They have no consciousness of us."

By the end of the tale, when Scrooge fearfully asks the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come his question—Will be? or only May be?—the answer will make an enormous difference. If the visions show things that _will_ be, Scrooge is doomed to a pitiful, lonely, desolate old age and death, and burial in a neglected graveyard where no one will visit to remember him. However, if they are only warnings of what _may_ be—he can sponge away the writing on his tombstone, change his life, and live to be loved, cherished, and fondly remembered as a man who made a difference for good in the world.

And now Wendy and Dipper found themselves in Scrooge's place. After Billy Sheaffer's warning, they both felt a certain reluctance to begin. However, they could think of no other way back, and Dipper had a sick feeling that if Mabel was shortly to be 81, Grunkle Ford would no longer be around to offer help, so they had no expert to call on. Still—

"It's so hard to trust Cipher," Dipper muttered, standing in the diffused glow of his flashlight, which made the glyphs on the wall look oddly threatening.

Wendy sighed. "Yeah, I know, Dip. But right now—I think we have to trust him."

Sheaffer had warned that it might take one trial, or maybe a hundred. That could mean they were stuck here for a long time. Dipper said, "I hope the flashlight batteries hold out."

Wendy said, "Turn it off when the pictures are lighting up the place. And stand with your hand close to the bow tie, so you can find it even in the dark. Worst comes to worst, I've got, let's see . . . an eighty per cent charge in my phone, so I could use the flashlight app. That would buy us a couple hours or so."

For a full minute, Dipper stood next to Wendy and breathed in the earthy, cool scent of the cave, building up his courage. _I hope I can be strong if we see bad stuff. Strong for Wendy and strong for myself._ Then he took a deep breath and asked, "Could I have a kiss for luck?"

"That's the Bill Cipher in you," she teased.

He gave her a weak grin. "No. It's pure Dipper Pines, I swear."

They stood pressed close together and kissed for luck, and if luck is to be measured by the duration of the kiss, that day they were fated to be among the luckiest people on the West Coast (at least). Then Dipper inhaled again and braced himself. "Hold my hand." She took his left, and he experimentally tried to turn the bowtie with his right. As Billy Sheaffer had advised, he turned it to the right, clockwise.

It swiveled—with a low stony grating, but it turned with very little resistance halfway around—and he pressed it, feeling it sink a little and then hearing it click. This time he also felt, rather than heard, a very soft hum, more a vibration in the air itself—or just in his mind.

"Here we go," Wendy said, squeezing his hand. "Something's happening."

The foggy silver light faded up, and Dipper turned off his flashlight. Colors shimmered in the glowing cloud and condensed into vague figures. Then they saw themselves. Or a version of themselves.

"Hey," Wendy said. "I think this is our wedding day!"

"Not what we need to see," Dipper said, reaching to turn the bowtie again.

"Wait, let's at least see what it's gonna be like."

Wendy was wearing a white dress with a crown of daisies around her head. She was absolutely beautiful. Her hair was longer—it had grown back to its full length at whatever date the image showed—and her expectant smile looked radiant.

But . . . it quickly changed to an angry frown.

Dipper, in a dark gray suit, had opened a door and approached her. He looked upset and said something that, judging from his expression, was not pleasant—the picture was still silent—and she responded. Agitated, waving their arms, they began to yell at each other, red-faced, and finally Wendy snatched the engagement ring off her finger, hurled it to the floor, ripped the flowers off her head— _Mabel's touch!_ Dipper thought as the torn petals fluttered—and she stormed out the door.

"Oh, dude!" Wendy said, her voice upset. "Turn it, please."

Dipper did, but he hesitated in the dark before pressing it. He sent her a thought:

— _I don't think that would ever happen._

 _I can't see how it would._

But he could tell she was badly shaken.

He clicked the tie, and the disturbing moving image went out. "Guess I'll have to turn it and push it again to see another one," he said.

"Before you do—Dipper, straight up, that wouldn't happen to us, would it? The vision's a lie."

— _Maybe it's just, you know, more of a warning. But no, I can't think of anything that could make us that mad at each other._

 _Me neither, Dip. OK, we're real good at making and keeping pledges. Let's make another one before we see the next show. We ever get mad at each other, let's pledge right here and now that we'll talk it all out and really listen to each other before we like blow up. Deal?_

— _That's a deal. But this is just one of those might-be things, I know it. I mean, you have a temper, and so do I, but me—well, I always get madder at myself than at anybody else. And somebody has to hurt you a lot to make you get your rage on. Like those stupid car thieves._

 _Yeah, or Bill Cipher back when he kidnapped my whole family. Anyhow, if I ever do or even say anything at all that makes you the least bit mad, you'll tell me right off and we'll talk it out, and I promise the same with you. Are we good?_

— _We're good. Ready for the next one?_

 _Not really, but we gotta do it. Let 'er rip._

* * *

Oh, the things they saw, there underground in the darkness and the dust. Some of the scenes were so bad it made them look away and cringe:

Wendy, half fallen out of her car after a terrible crash when her Dodge Dart collided head-on with a lumber truck. Serious blood dripped down the crushed side of the car and pooled on the pavement. Her body hung limp from the side window, arms twisted in wrong ways. She looked dead.

 _Quick turn._

Dipper, coming home from—college classes, he guessed, because he looked older—with books under his arm. He hurried along under street lights, bundled up in a warm coat, walking fast, but in between lights, three thugs jumped him and beat on him, the books fell and leaves tore from them and scattered, and then one thug pulled a gun—

 _Quick turn._

Both of them, older, sitting side-by-side in an airplane that was rolling over and over as it fell uncontrollably from the air.

 _Quick turn._

Dipper going into their bedroom and finding on the pillow a note from Wendy—they couldn't see what it said, beyond her signature, but it made him collapse like a marionette with cut strings.

 _Quick turn._

"Man," Wendy complained as they took a breather in the dark. "Is this the bad-luck theater? There's nothing good here! All these things are awful. It can't all be true."

"I don't think any of it's true," Dipper said. "I think—yeah, I'm pretty sure—this must be a booby trap of Bill's. I mean Triangle Bill, when he set this—what did he call it? Prognosticator up. I'd bet anything that anybody other than Bill trying it gets these horrible premonitions of disaster. Enough of them to prevent them from sticking with it long enough to see the truth."

"Sounds like something Cipher would do," Wendy agreed. "So—we just gotta watch and suffer until we get to the one good part? Is that it?"

"Maybe not," Dipper said. "I have a microscopic part of Bill inside me. Maybe I just have to, I don't know, call on my inner Bill? If the device detects that, maybe it'd behave itself."

"Why didn't Sheaffer just tell us that, then?" Wendy asked.

It was a good question. "Well, Cipher's always tricky. I mean, even when he's done good stuff, he's made it like a kind of game. And he's always sowing confusion, even if it's harmless, like the codes and all."

"Hey," Wendy said. "Something about what we've been seeing just struck me. None of our pictures have had subtitles, like the first ones did. What's with that?"

"We're not Bill," Dipper said. "Somehow, I guess it knows that. Or maybe Bill wrote reminders and observations to himself when he set it all up, the way I do in my Journals." He paused. "Want me to try to see if I can contact Bill in the Mindscape and ask him for help? I won't if you think it's a bad idea."

"No, it's OK, try to summon up your Cipher," Wendy said. "I don't think I can take much more of all this gloom and doom. It's really getting to me."

"Yeah, I know what your mean. OK, I have to sit down. Hold my hand, and if I get myself in trouble, wake me up. Even if you have to slap me hard. You'll know if I need it."

They sat on the soft, cool sand, leaning back against the cave wall. On that sweltering summer day, it would have felt pleasant if the dire possible futures they had glimpsed didn't hang heavy over their heads. There alone in the cool dark, they might even have snuck in some very private cuddle time—but no, anxiety spurred them to get out of the cave and get back to their own time.

So Dipper did his relaxation, his autohypnosis, and sank into the Mindscape.

Wow. Absolutely darkness surrounded him. He might have been a coal or diamond miner deep below the surface of the Earth, or Jonah in the belly of the whale. "Great fish," he mentally corrected. The Bible story of Jonah never mentioned whales.

Dipper thought, _So dark even here. Even in the Mindscape, I'm still here in this cave. OK. Bill Cipher! You probably know what's going on. What am I doing wrong? How can I make the Prognosticator help us back onto our own time line?_

And though he still couldn't see a thing, in his trance, it seemed to Dipper that he could hear a familiar voice: _Well, would you_ _look at this. Pine Tree is stumped! Ah-ha-ha-ha! Get it? Tree? Stumped? That's a lumberjack joke! What, not even a chuckle? I'm unappreciated in my own time._

— _Come on, Bill. It's not a time for joking, all right? I'm asking for your help here. You know where we are, don't you?_

 _Sure. You and Red stumbled into Modoc's old lodge, huh? Bad move, Pine Tree! You don't belong here. You're not lodge members. Get that one? No? You're no fun! However, this little adventure at least let you meet my grown-up avatar, and he's not bad, if I do say so ourselves. Are you listening, Axolotl? Bill Sheaffer ain't BAD, get it? Huh? No response? Between you and me, Pine Tree, Old Frilly's no fun either, and he never answers his phony. Where were we, kid?_

— _Bill, please, focus. Me and Wendy are trapped! We somehow got off on the wrong time line, and Billy Sheaffer says we have to use your Prognosticator to see ourselves as we are at this moment and somehow that'll fix things. But it just keeps showing us disasters._

 _Hey, kid, did you know "disaster" means "evil star?" Man, if I'd gone for Mabel instead of you, I'd be ruling your universe about now. Me and the Queen of Chaos, baby! She'd make a fabulous Goth chick. OK, OK, don't lose your cool, Dipper. I'll spill the secret. It's so simple you'll kick yourself! Look, this thing operates on extradimensional physics, OK? You know what Arthur C. Clarke said? "If it's real good tech, it's the same as magic."_

— _He didn't say that! Or write it!_

 _I got the GIST, Pine Tree! So you gotta understand, to me the thing's tech, OK? To you meatbags, it's magic. Therefore, before you turn the dial and push the button, you just have to say the magic word._

— _What's the magic word?_

 _No, What's on second! Ah-ha-ha-ha! Wow, hard audience. Seriously, I could tell you, Pine Tree, but then it wouldn't work. The catch is you gotta find the magic word yourself! Real simple. Good luck, kid._ The voice broke into a singsong lilt: _You're gonna nee—eed it!_

Dipper woke with a jerk. "Whoa!" he said.

Wendy squeezed his hand. "I'm here, dude. I think I got that, or most of it. Come on, we can figure it out."

"Magic word, magic word," Dipper said, catching his breath. "I guess we can try the old standbys. Here goes. Abracadabra!"

He turned and pressed the tie.

And immediately clicked the horrible images off.

They showed Wendy, trapped motionless but fully aware in the banner, as she had been when Bill caught them in the Fearamid during Weirdmageddon. And Triangle Bill snapped his fingers, and the banner began to burn from hem upwards, flames destroying the silently screaming Wendy, and Dipper, sprawled on the stone floor of the Fearamid, staring up in helpless horror, shrieked—

"God, that was a bad one!" Wendy said. "When I have nightmares, I'm stuck in that damn banner!"

"Presto?" Dipper mumbled furiously. "Alakazam? Shazam? Hocus pocus?"

"Bibbidi-bobbidy-boo?" Wendy asked. "Sim Sala Bim? Klaatu barada nikto?"

"None of those _feels_ right," Dipper said. He slapped his head. "Think! Think! It's gotta be a trick of Bill's! A rotten joke!"

"Maybe they're in Bill's language," Wendy said. "The magic words, I mean."

"Could be, but somehow that seems wrong," Dipper said. "Wouldn't be something we could never guess, or it wouldn't be fun for him to taunt us with the simplicity of it. Something real esoteric, maybe? I've read about magic words and phrases in Ford's Journals. What are some of the stranger ones? _Ajji majji la tarajji. Jantar Mantar Jadu Mantar. {{CURRENTYEAR}}."_

"Huh?" Wendy asked.

"The last one? It's a hexadecimal command. That one makes a program display the year. Programmers call things like that 'magic words.'"

"Did not know that. Might be worth a try."

"I . . . don't think so," Dipper said. "Doesn't seem like Cipher's style. But then he _was_ talking about tech. OK, let's try it and see if it works."

It did not. The images showed Dipper and Wendy as skeletons stretched out on the sandy floor of the cave.

"Bill, you drive me crazy!" Dipper said between his teeth. "Magic words. Magic words. Ma—hah!"

"You got something?" Wendy asked.

"I'm about sixty per cent sure," Dipper said. "Oh, man, if I'm right—here, let's get ready. We're gonna try one more time!"


	7. Chapter 7

**Yesterday's Tomorrows**

 **(Monday, August 8, 2016)**

* * *

 **Chapter 7: The Magic Words**

" _Not believe in Magic! Why, those ladies and gentlemen who cannot believe in Magic are to be pitied, and watched, and guarded against; for, the first thing one knows, such Beings may easily be tempted to evil ends, and are even apt to begin believing in things we all know are not really so, such as Politics!"_ –Charles Dickens

* * *

"The magic word is 'please,' isn't it?" Wendy asked, nudging Dipper with an elbow.

Dipper shook his head. "I thought of that, but no. Can't be. Bill said magic _words_ , plural, remember? I don't think he's trying to deceive us, exactly. I mean, he's probably telling us at least a version of the truth. Bill's always cryptic—but what he really means, well, people have to figure that out by knowing all the twists and turns of Bill's mind. And another reason that it can't be 'please' is that I think Bill's like Grunkle Stan—that word kind of sticks in his throat!"'

Wendy thought that over. "Yeah, I remember Stan getting heartburn when he used to have to say that word. I guess you may have a point there. So plural. Words, huh? 'Please and thank you,' then."

Dipper still disagreed. "No, don't think so. _Thank you_ is something that Bill's at least as allergic to as _please_. But I might be wrong."

Wendy took a deep, uneasy breath. "Then wouldn't it be better to wait until you're sure? I mean, seriously, what happens to us if you guess the wrong magic words, Dip? Do we get dumped way back in the Mesozoic or some deal?"

"Probably not. Grunkle Ford thinks that Bill first noticed Earth in the Mindscape about six or seven thousand years ago, and that his first visit was to Ancient Egypt. I'm thinking he wouldn't send us back farther in time than that. And in the cave—well, maybe he couldn't toss us back past the era when the Chinook people made the pictographs."

"Wait, Bill didn't make them?" Wendy asked.

"He couldn't have. No physical form, remember? He probably designed them though, and passed the designs on to Modoc during his dream-time visits. I'm not sure, though. This is all supposition."

"So maybe like pioneer days, or maybe Ancient Egypt, huh?" Wendy asked. "Egypt. Well, that could explain the Pyramids, I guess! Seriously, though, would the wrong words really mess us up in time or in some other way?"

Dipper considered the question. "I can only tell you what I think, Wen. Since Bill has specific words in mind, the Prognosticator probably wouldn't react to anything else. Wouldn't hear them as magic words, I mean, and probably they wouldn't affect it. Like, you know, voice-recognition on your phone. You have to say something like 'Siri' to wake it up,a nd it won't react to anything else. Probably the same thing applies here. I'd say we're safe enough. Anyway, I'm pretty confident I know the words Bill meant. Over the years I've kinda learned how he thinks. Trust me, Magic Girl?"

She kissed his cheek. "Every time, Big Dipper. If you think you're right—then I say go for it."

Dipper swallowed, wishing he had the same kind of confidence in his sharpness that Wendy had. "Wish us luck, then. Are you ready?"

"As I'll ever be," Wendy said. "Hold my hand."

"OK. Here we go." Dipper clasped Wendy's right hand with his left one, and with his right hand, he pocketed the flashlight. In the dark he hesitated just for a moment, reached up and found the stone bowtie by touch, counted one, two, three in his head, and then said out loud, " _The magic words_."

He heard Wendy's surprised giggle. And then he turned the bowtie.

It grated, clicked into place, and—the cave showed up in foggy dim illumination.

"Woohoo!" Wendy said, letting go of his hand to punch the air. Because there they were, or their images, like watching a closed-circuit TV shot of themselves, Wendy Corduroy, caught in the very act of punching the air, and Dipper Pines, his right hand on the bow tie. "You got it, Dip! Bill told you to say the magic words, and that's exactly what the little chunk of masonry meant! You rule, man!"

Dipper realized he had been holding his breath and exhaled in relief. "That's it! The image—look, it waves when I wave! That's what Billy Sheaffer told us to look for. OK, Wendy, get ready to run for the exit." He reached for his pocket. "Wait, though—here, you take the flashlight. Turn it on. All right, get ready to run for the exit. Here we go." He tapped the bowtie with his fist, it clicked, the image went dark, and they sprinted for the crevice.

"You first, you first!" Dipper said. They flattened themselves and squeezed into the uncomfortably narrow passage. He could tell that Wendy was anxious—she was trying to rush it, impatiently pushing past rock projections and tight places that really called for care, squirming, and a certain amount of breath control.

"Something chasing us?" Wendy asked, sounding alarmed.

"No, but what if the spell has a limited time to work?"

"Gotcha!" she sped up.

Their apprehensiveness made exiting much harder than coming in had been. Wendy had the light and the lead, and she kept pausing, grunting, and then pushing through regardless. Several times Dipper heard fabric ripping, and once or twice his clothes got snagged, too.

"Gah!" Wendy said. "Thank God! Here, let me help you." She reached back and all but dragged him out of the passage.

She had burst into the outer cavern. No one was there, not Mabel, not Billy. Without pausing, the teens crossed it and dropped to hands and knees for the last long crawl out.

Dipper's mind raced with worry and self-doubt: _What if I guessed wrong? What if the image we just saw was some kind of dirty trick of Bill's, some unfunny practical joke?_ He tried to reassure himself—they hadn't emerged into the outer cave to find an elderly Mabel and Billy, after all, and the passageway to the outside world had not been artificially tunneled out, as it had when they'd encountered Mabel.

The going was still slow. Sometimes the passage ceiling dipped down, and they had to drop down onto their stomachs and try to worm their way out. The bare rock under their knees wasn't sharp, but it was irregular and, most of all, hard. Dipper's hands were scuffing, and he could feel his knees aching as if he'd seriously overdone a track practice.

Ahead of him, Wendy scrambled along, occasionally muttering a low, mild curse as she bumped her head or had to duck down even lower. "It's getting lighter!" she said. "The exit must be right around the next little bend."

The crawl-tunnel was so low and narrow, though, that Wendy's body blocked Dipper's vision for another twenty feet. Then he glimpsed the gray light of day. At that moment, Wendy stopped abruptly, and he plowed headfirst right into her butt.. "You're gettin' to like that, aren't you?" she asked. "Whoa, no—no—no—don't do it!"

 _Where have we come out?_ wondered Dipper. _And when?_


	8. Chapter 8

**Yesterday's Tomorrows**

 **(Monday, August 8, 2016)**

* * *

 **Chapter 8: Emerging**

" _O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?_

 _O stay and hear! your true-love's coming_

 _That can sing both high and low;_

 _Trip no further, pretty sweeting,_

 _Journeys end in lovers' meeting—_

 _Every wise man's son doth know."—_ William Shakespeare, _Twelfth Night_.

* * *

"What is it? What is it?" Dipper yelled frantically, worried out of his mind. "Wendy?"

Ahead of him, blocking his way and his vision, she wriggled and twisted, yipping and yelping and—giggling. "No, no, no!" she yelled. "No, boy, get down, glad to see you but—hey, no, not my hair!" She was laughing hard.

"What is it?" Dipper asked. "I'd like to get out of here—"

Wendy grunted. "Yeah, me, too, but somebody's blocking the way. Back up. Back up, that's right. Good, good." She scrambled forward. "OK, I'm out!"

Wendy scuttled out into the sunshine, and Tripper, cone and all, galumphed past her and into the mouth of the exit and despite the cone he wore, started frantically licking Dipper's face. "Pull him back, please!" Dipper pleaded. "It's good to see him, but man, he's enthusiastic!"

"Tripper! Good boy! Come! Come, Tripper!" Dipper recognized Mabel's voice—her _young_ voice—and a butt-waggling Tripper awkwardly backed out of the cave, letting Dipper scramble out into the open. He jumped up and laughed with sheer relief. "Sis!" he said, hugging her and picking her up off the ground. He spun her around. "It's so good to see you!"

"Whoa-ho-ho, Broseph! C'mon, put me down, I'm too heavy for this, you'll hurt yourself."

Dipper set her down. "What day is it?" he asked.

Mabel laughed like a loon. Choking, she said, "Oh, sorry. I'm sorry, but you reminded me of when our fifth-grade class put on _A Christmas Carol_ for the PTA! Remember? You were the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—" she turned to Wendy and explained, "the Ghost doesn't have any lines, and Dipper's a terrible actor—"

"No, I'm not!" Dipper objected. "I just had a touch of stage fright, that's all."

"Yeah, yeah, you couldn't even get out 'God bless us, every one!' Anyway, Wendy, I was the Intelligent Lad. And Scrooge, that was Roddy Creeley, he yells to me, 'I say, Boy, what day is to-day?' And I was supposed to say, 'To-day, sir? Why, to-day is Christmas Day!' and then he'd send me to get the turkey, but—" she doubled over laughing—"but Rodney Creeley had made me mad by pinching my bottom, I'd never go with him anyhow, and he played Scrooge 'cause he was so skinny, so I—" more laughing—"I yelled back to him, 'To-day, sir? Why, to-day is June nineteenth!'"

"She really stopped the show," Dipper said to Wendy. "Oh, Wen, your clothes are all ripped."

The left shoulder of her green-plaid flannel shirt was torn all the way loose at the seam, and her bare skin showed through—and her jeans were not only laddered, but hanging in shreds from her right thigh, a big rip from panty-line to knee showing her scratched leg. "Yeah, I kinda got in too much of a hurry," she said. "'S OK, I've got a change in the Shack."

Mabel had picked up the over-enthusiastic Tripper. She set the dog down again—he pranced all around them in the crazy, celebratory way that dogs do. You leave the house, your loving doggie comes to the door and looks at you with sad eyes as you depart, you shut the door. Count to ten and open the door again, and the pup goes into a dogasm of joy: "You're back! You're back! You're back at last! I thought you'd never return! I was so lonely!"

That's what Tripper was doing.

"Yeah, that Christmas play was fun," Dipper said, stooping to pet the dog and calm him down. "But seriously, what day is it, Mabel? For real?"

Wendy had checked her phone. "Says here it's Sunday afternoon."

"Sunday nothing! Try Monday morning!" Mabel said. "You guys disappeared! What happened to your clothes, Wendy, did my Brobro get a little too _ardent_ in his wooing?" She turned to Dipper. "That means—"

"I _know_ what it means," Dipper said. "And no. We were exploring the cave, and we got into a very tight spot—"

"I'll just bet you did, you sensualist!" Mabel said with a grin, slapping him on the back.

"Ow! Stop it. No kidding, there's some real tight spots in a narrow crevice passage, and we had a hard time getting—"

"Mabel! Where are you?"

Dipper blinked. "Grunkle Ford?"

"Well, you two were missing, and we thought maybe you'd eloped to Reno—is that right, do people elope to Reno to get an emergency wedding? Wherever. Anyway, we got worried when neither of you answered your phones, and Grunkle Ford—we're over HERE, GRUNKLE FORD! I FOUND THEM!—Grunkle Ford flew a drone around and located the Dodge Dart and we drove out with Tripper, and he sniffed you out through the woods. Hi, Grunkle Ford, Dipper attacked Wendy and ripped most of her clothes off. Hormones."

Ford emerged from the undergrowth, his glasses askew, his eyes blinking. "What? What?"

"It's a Mabel story," Dipper said. "We were exploring this cave—"a

"I boarded that up thirty-six years ago!" Ford said, staring at the stacked redwood planks. "You kids shouldn't have broken in!"

"It's cool, Dr. P.," Wendy said. "We're OK. Just tore our clothes a little getting back to the pictographs. Dip's gonna have some serious stuff to tell you, though. Man, my dad's gonna kill me!"

"No, Mabel took care of that," Mabel said. "Ha. Mabel likes talking about Mabel in the third person! Seriously, really, I called him last night when I couldn't get you guys on the phone, and told him you were staying over, and he said he guessed it would be OK, but now it's like nine-thirty in the morning, so you'd probably better call him."

Dipper was looking at his phone. "Mine's just corrected from five p.m. yesterday to nine thirty-three Monday," he said. "Grunkle Ford, we got caught in a time loop."

"Time loop?" Ford asked. "Did you actually reach the inner chamber?"

"The one with the Indian signs—'scuse me, shouldn't say that, the Native American art, I mean, yeah," Wendy said. "All those pictographs of Bill Cipher."

"Indeed," Ford said. "I've always sensed something odd went on with time inside that chamber! It's like what my brother calls the Outhouse of Mystery. Time passes differently there."

"We discovered something that Bill Cipher, not the Native Americans, created," Dipper said.

"Indeed?" Ford put his six-fingered hand against the rocky bluff, as if taking its stony pulse. "This tunnel once led to the medicine lodge of Modoc, the great Chinook mystic, who had an encounter and confrontation with Bill Cipher back in the 1860s. In fact, this is where I made the worst mistake of my life—"

"You summoned Bill Cipher," Dipper said. "We know, but—"

Wendy was on the phone and waved for silence. "Hi, Dad? You and the boys were OK with breakfast this morning? Oh, man. Yeah, I'll go straight to the house and start cleaning up. What? He is? Where? I can hear the saws goin', man! Yeah, Dad, I know that. Fine, don't worry, I'll take care of the house and all. Love you, Dad." She clicked the _off_ button. "Dad and the boys are upstate for a couple days, helping Junior with a rush logging operation for the state, clearing some treefalls that blocked a highway after all that rain. They won't be back before Thursday morning, but—Dad says the boys left the house a mess, so I've got to go clean up on my day off."

"I'll come and help," Dipper volunteered.

Mabel nudged him. "I'll _bet_ you will!"

It was all confusing for a while, but they eventually sorted things out: Ford would drive Dipper back to the Mystery Shack and Dipper would tell him the story of what had happened in the cave on the way. Mabel and Tripper would ride back with Wendy. At the Shack, she'd clean up and get a change of clothes, and later she and Dipper would go to work on setting the Corduroy house to rights.

Ford was an excellent listener, waiting for pauses to interject his questions. "Fascinating," he said. "I didn't experiment with that particular glyph, but obviously rigging it was one of Cipher's tricks. He couldn't fully manifest in the real world, but his servants—Modoc's acolytes, as long as Modoc was under the spell of Cipher's lies—could follow his directions, just as I did in constructing my Portal. From what you say, Cipher perverted what Modoc imagined to be a place where their minds could join in communion to create a kind of computer storage device where, even from the Mindscape, Cipher could make his plans and test their efficacy. The time element—well, it probably let him at least glimpse possible alternative futures to help guide his actions."

"Something like that, I suppose," Dipper said.

"Did Cipher physically attack you?" Ford asked. "You're very scratched up, and I noticed that Wendy had swatches of fabric missing from her attire. She seems to have some abrasions, too, unless the two of you tussled—"

Dipper chuckled. "Don't listen to Mabel! No, remember how you had to squeeze through that crevice to get to the pictograph chamber?"

"Very well," Ford said. "Even back then it was a tight fit for me. Had I been the least bit claustrophobic, I'd never have made the passage. Today I'd probably emerge with torn clothing, too! I've gained a bit of weight."

"You could still make it," Dipper assured him. "But Wendy and I were anxious to get out. The first time we left, we came out in some alternate time line sixty-five years from now—like 2081! And Billy Sheaffer was in his seventies and knew he'd been Bill Cipher and actually helped us and was taking care of Mabel—it was weird, she was very old—and anyway, he sent us back to the inner cave with partial instructions. We couldn't make them work at first, and I had to go into the Mindscape to clarify some things with Bill, and—here we are. The tearing and the skinned knees were on us, not Bill. Our fault, and the fact that we were, um, scared and scrambling to get out."

"Do me a huge favor," Ford said, parking the car in the Shack lot. "Write all this up in your Journal in full detail and give me a copy. I'll definitely want to visit that cave again."

"Might not be a good idea," Dipper warned delicately.

"No, you misunderstand. Visit it to ascertain that no one else is trapped inside on a time loop, and then make sure the place is properly sealed up for good this time, so that no one else ever wanders in and finds himself in the kind of trouble you've just had."

"All right," Dipper said. "I'll write it all up for you, everything I remember."

The time difference started to catch up with him. Dipper felt jet-lagged—he'd missed a night of sleep by short-cutting time through the device. And he and Wendy were ravenous. They ate an impressive brunch, which they mostly prepared themselves, and although Mabel had eaten breakfast, she joined in to help them eat: poached eggs on a bed of spinach and an English muffin, with Hollandaise sauce, huevos rancheros (courtesy of Abuelita), and chicken sausage on the side. Plenty of good coffee and eight-ounce glasses of orange juice rounded the meal out.

Wendy showered and changed, dumping her damaged clothes in the garbage—"These were old, anyhow. Have to visit the Sprawl-Mart for some replacements," she said. "I have enough work clothes, but my leisure wardrobe's getting threadbare."

By noon, Dipper and Wendy were at Casa Catastrophe, aka the Corduroy house. "Man!" Dipper said, looking around the kitchen, a scene of devastation. "How in the heck do they dirty up every pot and pan in the whole place, just for one dinner and then breakfast?"

"They never plan to wash up, so they don't think it matters," Wendy said. "Yuck, what's this burnt mess? Smells putrid. I think it maybe started out to be pancakes, but now it's carbon!"

They practically had to take a cold chisel to the big cast-iron skillet. And then after all the dish washing and drying, the emptying of the garbage and the changing of the tablecloth, they had to sweep and mop and clean up spills, then vacuum the living room and Wendy's room . . . they did everything but make Manly Dan's and the boys' beds. "I draw the line there," Wendy said. "I toss in the sheets and pillowcases and covers, and sometimes they put 'em on the bed and sometimes they just let 'em lay and sleep in the dirty sheets for another week, until even they can't stand the grit."

At four that afternoon, the two tired teens settled onto the living-room sofa—and promptly fell asleep, leaning against each other.

The Corduroy house stood about six miles from the Mystery Shack by road, maybe four miles cross-country. Mabel, fueled by a breakfast, brunch, and lunch, took Tripper on a long walk—the vet had recommended exercise—and they happened to wander through the woods in that direction, crossing over a creek on a rustic log bridge and winding up in the Corduroy backyard.

"Might as well see if they need help," Mabel said.

She and Tripper very quietly climbed the slope and found the back door unlocked.

"Aw." Mabel stood in the doorway, looking at her brother and his girlfriend asleep. She took one photo with her phone—the scene was innocent, and it wouldn't even matter if their mom saw the picture, she thought. Then, quietly, she and Tripper went back outside. Tripper yipped once—a squirrel was menacing the peace of the world high up in a redwood tree—but Mabel gently shushed him.

Through a hot August afternoon, girl and dog sauntered back to the Mystery Shack. At seven that evening, just as the Ramirezes and Mabel sat down to dinner, Dipper and Wendy turned up again.

"Dawgs!" said Soos. "Sorry I was in town when you two first got here this morning. We're so glad you guys are OK. We were like worried about you or some junk, you know?"

"It got a little scary," Wendy admitted. "But, like most things, I guess, everything turned out all right in the end. All it took was—" she glanced at Dipper and gave him her pretty smile—"a little time."

* * *

The End


End file.
